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In May, 2007, I returned to Guatemala and Belize to visit more Maya
sites with my good friend, Enrico Caputo (of Otupac
Tours). After flying directly to the Flores airport on Lake Peten
in northeast Guatemala, I stayed in El Remate at the lovely bungalow
complex, La
Casa de Don David, belonging to the very interesting David Kuhn.
On our first day's trek, we headed south through Sayaxche to the Maya
site at Cancuén. We took a small launch down the Pasion river
to the Cancuén site. There are on-going excavations at Cancuén,
where the archaeologists have restored two swimming pools, one of
which was found containing sacrificed human remains. After an overnight
at the surprisingly nice Hotel Cancuén, we drove back to El
Remate by way of the Maya site at Dos
Pilas. Dos Pilas is interesting for its military interactions
with nearby Tikal and Seibal under the influence of Calakmul. The
temples at Dos Pilas are beautiful while the remains of two concentric
defensive walls built from ransacked temples by later occupants can
be clearly seen. Next we went to Uaxactún
and Yaxha, both north of Tikal national park. Uaxactún contains
many plazas and temples, the most famous of which are the "E"
complex which shows alignments with the rising sun at the solstices.
Yaxha has a beautiful reconstruction of huge temples connected by
very wide roads, undoubtedly used for ceremonial purposes. We climbed
Temple 216 at Yaxha
for a most beautiful and serene view of the lake and the jungle. Enrico
and I spent many afternoons contemplating the questions of the mechanism
of the collapse of the Classic Maya period and the diffusion of the
reasonably standardized Maya glyph language. The next day, we drove
east into Belize. The Belizean border customs officials were a real
pain in the ass, asking to examine our suitcases which we had to drag
into the customs building, then saying they really didn't mean it.
We drove to the Maya site of Caracol
in the south of Belize over what must be the worst road in the world.
Fifty kilometers of washboard dirt caused by the continuing use of
the road by the British Army tanks (I thought they were gone!) and
the absence of any repairs. Because of recent criminal attacks we
received an army escort but it did not seem required. The temple called
Ca'ana is awe inspiring. It is massively huge and dominates its plaza.
After a teeth-rattling drive to San Ignacio we spent the night in
the very comfortable cottage complex at the Log Cab-Inn. The next
morning it was off to Belize City where we stayed at the Best Western
Biltmore motel and visited the smaller Maya site of Altun
Ha. We had had too much of the lackadaisical attitudes in Belize
and drove directly back to El Remate in Guatemala, which gave me another
free day to tour. We used it to revisit Tikal.
We went to the P complex which I had missed last year. We saw many,
many howler monkeys and spider monkeys, as well as crocodiles, herons,
coatimundis and iguanas. I flew back the next day, Friday, to Guatemala
City where Enrico picked me up in his van at the airport for a drive
to Panajachel on Lake Atitlan where I boarded a launch to the Posada
Santiago Atitlan. The Posada is a beautiful complex of stone cottages
built on the banks of Lake Atitlan, just outside of Santiago. It is
perhaps the most beautiful hotel I have ever stayed in – lovely
gardens and a magnificent view of the volcano, San
Pedro, across the Lake. I spent three days at the Posada, just
relaxing. On Sunday, I went to the market and bought embroidered Maya
textiles. On Monday, the lady who owns the Posada, Suzie, made appointments
for me with local Maya
weavers. The work of Sra. Dolores Ratzin so impressed me that
I bought two textiles from her, which now adorn my walls at home.
- In
May, 2006, I visited the Maya sites of Copán, Tikal, Quirigua
and Seibal. With only my newfound close friend, Enrico Caputo (of
Otupac
Tours), I first spent an afternoon at the National Museum of Archaeology
and Ethnology in Guatemala City, before setting off with him for Copán,
just across the border in Honduras. Copán
is indescribably beautiful! In particular, the entire Rosalila
structure is reconstructed in the wonderful on-site Museum
along with many magnificent examples of Maya stelae, vessels, eccentric
flints and stucco masks. After two days we set off back to Guatemala
for Tikal and visited the site of Quirigua along the route. Some of
the stelae
at Quirigua are over twenty feet high. At Tikal,
the many temples are designed to illustrate power in contrast to the
beauty shown at Copán. Temple
IV at Tikal, in particular, is over 240 feet high. They tell me
that the view
of the site from the top of Temple IV is beyond belief. When I
am younger, I will check it out. After three days at Tikal, including
a trek into the jungle north of the Mundo
Perdido (Lost World) complex, we spent a day at Seibal. We were
the only people there! Seibal
has magnificent structures and very interesting stelae. I flew back
to Guatemala City and visited the Popol Vuh Museum the next
day. Both museums have beautiful examples of Maya ceramics.
- During
the Fall semesters of 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2005, I taught "Evocative
African Art" as part of the Discover New York program within
the new St. John's Univ. Core Curriculum. The courses were taught
using web pages in a computer equipped classroom. Students showed
their own web sites that they had created during the course at the
Discover New York Research Day each December. The courses were all
resounding successes. Each term, we made two field trips to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. During Fall semester,
2005, we included a tour of the exhibition of Gary Schulze's African
Art at the Art Gallery of the Queensborough Community College. The
syllabus of the 2005 course can be seen at the web site: http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~watsonw/AFRICAN05/DNYSyllabus.htm
Each
semester, I adapt the web pages and notes of the course to emphasize
the effect of slavery on the various cultures of African-Americans
in New York City in order to participate in the team teaching of the
Honors Section of Discover New York on Immigration presented by the
St. John's Univ. Committee on Latin American and Caribbean Studies
(CLACS).
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- My
collection of African Art has grown substantially in the past few
years. One of my particular favorites is a small ivory
carving from the Yombe people of southwestern Congo and northern
Angola depicting a grieving mother and her dead infant. This piece
was shown in the "Perpetuating
the Culture: Mother and Child Images in African Art" exhibition
at the Hillwood Art Museum on the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island
University in Brookville, NY during August, September and October
of 2002. I recently acquired a wonderful five foot high wooden statue
of a Dogon man from the late eighteenth century and a fabulous, but
malodorous, "bulletproof" hunter's jacket, called a Batakari,
from the Mande people in Mali. It dates from the end of the nineteenth
century. The hunter's jacket was successfully deodorized in a vacuum
chamber and now hangs in the dining room. Another piece from my collection,
a wooden Dogon ancestor figure, was shown in the "African Sculpture
- Symbols of Culture" exhibition at the Donnell Center of the New
York City Public Library during September and October of 2003. There
was also an excellent show entitled "Symbolic Use of Animals in African
Cultural Arts," at the Walt Whitman Center in Camden, NJ from November
18, 2004 to February 28, 2005. Two Masks from my collection were on
display ( a Luba/Songye owl mask and a Bwa Honbo Rooster mask). From
December, 2004 until April, 2005, the African American Art Museum
of Nassau County in Hempstead, NY presented an exhibition of African
Art entitled, "Symbols
of Culture" in which five of my pieces were featured, including
a pair of Senufo Rhythm pounders, representing the primordial couple,
a Dogon satimbe mask, a non-typical Bamana Tyi-wara
mask and the Batakari.
A
beautiful Fang reliquary guardian, from Gabon, along with its bark
wood coffin is a featured pice of my collection. In 2005, I finally
completed my collection of all three Kuba Mwaash masks.
- In
January, 2005, I traveled to my favorite place on Earth – Oaxaca,
Mexico. There I acquired a magnificent alebrije (wood carving)
of a psychedelic dragon from the artistic genius carver, Francisco
Ojeda in San Martin Tilcajete. I stayed for a while with the excellent
weaver, Demetrio Baustida,
in Teotítlan del Valle where I acquired two of his amazing
tapides (tapestries). One wool tapide contains over
eighty shades of red obtained by adjusting the acidity of the natural
cochineal red dye. I
visited again the impressive Zapotec pyramid site of Monte
Alban and attended a dance/dinner with a presentation of many
of the folk dances of the guelaguetza . I have been going to
Oaxaca as often as I can since 1967. Again, in January, 2006, I traveled
to Oaxaca.
This time I visited again the Zapotec ruins
at Mitla.
I spent a day at Hierve
el Agua, a beautiful spring which produces travertine falls, not
unlike those at Yellowstone Park. On the last Sunday afternoon in
Oaxaca, the Oaxaca Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra set up hundreds
of chairs beside the Zocalo
and played most of the afternoon, as it does every week. There is
truly no better activity in the world than sitting in the Zocalo in
Oaxaca and contemplating the world.
- In
May, 2005, I traveled to France. I went to explore the Prehistoric
Art Caves from 12 to 25 centuries ago. I
stayed in a lovely 14th century chateau in Brive near the Dordogne
river. I was amazed at the beauty and sophistication of the wall paintings
at Grotte de Lascaux
II, Grotte de Font-de-Gaume,
and Pech
Merle. Even though Lascaux II is a copy of the original which
is closed to human visits, it is wonderful! I finished the visit with
a few nights in Paris.
- In
Fall, 2004, the book "Riemannian Submersions and Related Topics,"
by Maria Falcitelli, Stere Ianus and Anna Maria Pastore was published
by World Scientific Publications. The book provides a research level
exposition of this important field. Chapter 3, entitled "Almost Hermitian
Submersions," is devoted to the topic which I founded in 1976 (Almost
Hermitian Submersions, Journal of Differential Geometry, vol.
11, pp. 147-165) and studied extensively in many of my subsequent
publications. Chapter 4, entitled "Riemannian Submersions and Contact
Metric Manifolds," is devoted to Almost Contact Metric Submersions
which I (and, independently, Prof. Dominic Chinea) created in 1984
( The Differential Geometry of Two Types of Almost Contact Metric
Submersions, in The Mathematical Heritage of C. F. Gauss (ed.
G. Rassias) World Scientific Publ., pp. 827-861) and studied extensively
in many of my subsequent publications. Chapter 5, entitled "Einstein
Spaces and Riemannian Submersions," addresses this important topic
and elucidates the result I presented to the International Congress
of Mathematicians in Berlin, Germany in August, 1998 entitled "The
Goldberg Conjecture is True for the Four-dimensional Total Space of
an Almost Hermitian Submersion." Chapter 8 of the book, entitled
"Applications of Riemannian Submersions in Physics," devotes an entire
section (8.1) to Gauge Fields, Instantons and Riemannian Submersions,
developing the ansatz I reported in a paper entitled "Riemannian
Submersions and Instantons," delivered, by invitation, in 1980
to the Ninth International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation(GR9),
in Jena, German Democratic Republic, and published as "G, G' -
Riemannian Submersions and Nonlinear Gauge Field Equations in General
Relativity," in Global Analysis on Manifolds (G. Rassias, ed.),
Teubner-Texte in Mathematics, vol. 57, pp. 324-349, 1983, Liebzig.
The book, "Riemannian
Submersions and Related Topics," is
available from amazon.com.
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